As mentioned in my previous post, some of you reported having problems using my Android M5-RC14 image. I've looked into it, and although I still don't know what the problem was, I have a working version again.

I'm currently unable to upload a new version, so it will have to wait until tonight. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Flashing starts, and you are asked if you want to flash the kernel, if you want the microdrive to be formatted and if you want the root filesystem to be installed.Accept all questions answering them with y

After flashing is complete, the machine is rebooted. Login with root and type /start to start Android.Have fun, and let me know if you like it ;-)

Last Saturday The Band Of Horses played in Paradiso in Amsterdam. I like their music, a beautiful mixture of sound, with the astonishing high pitch voice of Ben Bridwell. We went with the four of us. Too bad I was the only one digging their music I guess, since the others all left early. Maybe it was because of the wall of sound, maybe it was their lack of taste. Doesn't matter, I had a great time :-)

After hours of spitting through traces trying to resolve all errors and searching for differences between the emulator and the Zaurus my conclusion was that the main difference was the way the framebuffer was used. Android uses a panning mechanism (page flipping) for screen updates, and this is currently unsupported in the default pxa2xx framebuffer code of the linux 2.6.23 kernel.

So I tried to add panning support to the framebuffer code, and with success! It needs some debugging though, because there are still some minor problems with the screen updates, but hey, the saga continues, Android on the Zaurus still seems to be a perfect match!

I've build a custom kernel for m5-rc14 and set up an image to run on my Zaurus. On startup, the system ends up with a black screen, just like others have already reported on various places.

So I fiddled a bit with the Android emulator tonight. I thought it might be interesting to see what the differences are between running Android on the emulator and on the Zaurus.

I modified ramdisk.img a bit, so Android doesn't starts up automatically in the emulator and I've also added strace to the image, which can be found in the root(/) directory. The emulator can be started using the modified image by running:

emulator -debug-kernel -console -ramdisk cortez.img

Now the emulator boots up and ends with a prompt. At that point, start Android by running:

A bit late, I know, but to my astonishment I just read that our prince of Orange, WimLex, has bought himself an iPhone in november 2007 already in an Apple store somewhere in New York.

I just tried to call him to ask him why he didn't told me anything about how to downgrade, jailbreak and activate the phone here in the Netherlands, but he doesn't seem to know how to get his voice mail up and running, because I'm unable to leave any messages. Could this be due to a memory overflow?!

/tmp and /cache are added since the previous version, so we have to add them to the Zaurus image as well.

Next thing I did was to rip the emulator file system. This can be done easily by pushing the binutils package to the emulator and archiving the /system, /data and /cache directories using the adb shell command.

Since kernel debugging isn't exactly one of my favorite hobbies, I then created a complete Zaurus (Spitz) image with the kernel used in the previous Android release, just to see what it did. Well, this ends up with a black screen, no bouncing red ball, nothing.

Setting the logging level to 7 or 8 shows lots and lots of errors, mostly related to the binder block device. I guess that's were most changes took place.

I am now in the process of applying the kernel changes. This is rather time consuming, so this could take a while longer. Unfortunately I don't have that much spare time currently. I know AndroidZaurus is also working on this, so maybe we could make this a joined effort .

Google released a new Android SDK recently... sigh, so much to do and so little time. I'll try to get this ported onto my Zaurus shortly, because it's so damn cool. We'll manage I'm sure, just wait and see.

Has someone ripped the file system already, or even better, managed to get the kernel patched successfully?

Anyway, dust off the dev-tools, get the party hats and let's get it on!

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, my mom used to say. The thought of these wise words crossed my mind while standing in the Apple store on my trip to the united states. My mom meant different apples of course, I knew that, but these Apples were looking really juicy!!

So, to make a long story even longer, I decided later that week that I wanted an iPhone, so I went over to the Apple store again and bought myself one. Since I knew that the phone would be usable only with a two-year (US) contract with AT&T I did some investigation first just to make sure it would be possible to use it here in the Netherlands using my current carrier provider contract.

Browsing the Net I entered the great new world of OOB's (Out Of the Box), Jailbraking, Firmware downgrading, activation, unlocking and the likes. Impressive, I didn't had the time to read all the details at that time, but I knew enough, namely that it would be possible with some effort.

After buying and unpacking the device a few things were striking. Apple really knows how to create beautiful looking devices, but I've NEVER seen any device with so little instructions. Just a small paper saying you have to browse to a website for full instructions. After charging, the device just says "Connect to iTunes to activate". That's all, no further functioning whatsoever. This is weird!

Well, back in Holland I started to read all about unlocking the device. I was glad I did that first, because otherwise I would probably already upgraded the device to the last firmware, which would have made unlocking a real drag. Anyway, after following the excellent step by step guide from the hackint0sh guys the iPhone was usable as a luxurious iTouch after some time. No phone function, that was still a no-go area, since this hasn't been hacked by means of software until now as far as I know.

So I searched for hardware solutions, found a seller on eBay selling some Chinese SIM manipulation card, and took the risk of buying one. Two days later the SIM arrived, and following a simple online guide here my iPhone displays Vodafone as a provider now, and I'm the happy owner of a fully working iPhone. Not bad at all, and that within just a week time!